I thought I'd just share with my readers a little letter that I have just sent to another PR/Marketing company in response to an unsolicited marketing mailing that they sent me. I usually receive these kind of mailings warmly and with respect to the sender, but this person got the basics so wrong, that here is my response:
Dear Tony
You recently sent Pickle Jar Communications a letter introducing some of the broadcast services that you provide. You began your letter with the words ‘I know unsolicited mail can be a pain ...’. I am sorry to say that in this instance your letter was considerably more of a pain than unsolicited marketing mail usually is.
In fact, I normally receive marketing materials from other companies and show my respect for the time they have taken to write to me by reading the information and making a decision as to whether it is something I am interested in or not. I rarely discard such mailings without looking at them, instead treating them in the same way that I would hope my own marketing materials would be treated.
Your mailing, however, served only to waste my time. You made the very simple mistake of not putting enough postage on your letter which meant that instead I received a note from Royal Mail informing me that there was a letter awaiting me in the local sorting office for which I needed to pay an additional £1.15 because the sender did not pay adequate postage.
Not knowing what the letter was, and equally thinking it could be something important, I took the time out of my day to drive to the sorting office, pay the additional postage and collect the item. I’m sure you can imagine how annoyed I was to see that my efforts were purely for a piece of direct marketing mail.
I would really hope that a fellow PR and marketing professional would know better than to annoy a potential customer by making such a simple mistake. As such, I now enclose my invoice to claim back from you the cost of postage, half an hour of my time in lost earnings, and the mileage to collect this letter from the sorting office.
Yours sincerely
Tracy Playle MCIPR
Director, Pickle Jar Communications Ltd
Thursday 28 August 2008
Thursday 14 August 2008
Very useful visual guide for how Broadcast PR people need to rethink PR
I know I am always banging on about how PR people need to rethink this and rethink that, but today David Cushman has posted a really useful presentation on slideshare that really helps PR people to visualise the differences and challenges them to find ways to engage with what he calls 'P2PR' (I like this expression, might adopt it myself!). Seeing as the embed tag is available on his presentation, here it is:
Wednesday 13 August 2008
New Handy Guide: Corporate Blogging
We've just created a new Handy Guide, though this time it's in the form of a slidecast. This is designed as an introduction for companies thinking about trying to engage with blogs or create their own corporate blog as a means of raising their profile or communicating with their stakeholders.
Friday 8 August 2008
A little video of our 1st Birthday party
I've decided to play around with Animoto again this time to make a little compilation video of photos from our 1st Birthday party:
What has been keeping us so quiet?
I promised in a blog post the other day that I would update you all on what we've been up to lately and what has been keeping us too busy to blog (not that there's ever really any excuse not to blog of course!).
Firstly, we were called up about six weeks ago by the University of Warwick asking us to write and oversee the design process for two of their new induction publications for the students arriving in September. Your First Weeks is a guide that takes the students through what they need to do before and after they arrive at Warwick, and what's available to them once they arrive in terms of events and induction sessions, societies and clubs, etc. The challenge with this document was to, for the first time, provide concise information to students in an engaging way with consistent tone and style throughout. The second document is the Student Handbook, a less exciting document by its very nature but a necessity. The challenge with this one was to produce something that the students would actually read and something that they would keep with them throughout the year. We prepared the copy for both documents, liaising with key contacts at the University to pull it all together, and then worked with Paul Dibbens of Mustard Design to oversee the design process and get the documents ready for print. Anyone following us on Twitter will have seen all the different phases we were at with this. Both documents are now at the printers and are being sent out to students next week.
That's not all. We were also called in to Alexon International (a large ladies-wear retailer) to help them announce the appointment of their new CEO to 5,000 staff. We proposed conducting an interview with their new CEO Jane McNally to ensure that staff could see she was motivated, keen to drive the business forward with a clear vision, but also personable and human! Again working with Mustard Design, we produced a 2-page document that is now being sent out to all staff. In truth, my preference for a communication like this, given how personable Jane actually is, would have been to record a podcast so that staff could also hear her tone of voice and hear her enthusiasm directly. However, access to technology can't be guaranteed with this company and we didn't want to alienate staff who didn't have PC access.
Finally (not all our work but our next big project) we were asked by the Open University to work with them to produce a video for staff. The video is to help staff who are not based at the headquarters in Milton Keynes to understand what happens on that campus, and also for new starters who will be working at the Walton Hall (HQ) campus to understand what is available there to them. Working with @Warblefly Productions, we filmed this project this week and are now in the post-production phase.
Firstly, we were called up about six weeks ago by the University of Warwick asking us to write and oversee the design process for two of their new induction publications for the students arriving in September. Your First Weeks is a guide that takes the students through what they need to do before and after they arrive at Warwick, and what's available to them once they arrive in terms of events and induction sessions, societies and clubs, etc. The challenge with this document was to, for the first time, provide concise information to students in an engaging way with consistent tone and style throughout. The second document is the Student Handbook, a less exciting document by its very nature but a necessity. The challenge with this one was to produce something that the students would actually read and something that they would keep with them throughout the year. We prepared the copy for both documents, liaising with key contacts at the University to pull it all together, and then worked with Paul Dibbens of Mustard Design to oversee the design process and get the documents ready for print. Anyone following us on Twitter will have seen all the different phases we were at with this. Both documents are now at the printers and are being sent out to students next week.That's not all. We were also called in to Alexon International (a large ladies-wear retailer) to help them announce the appointment of their new CEO to 5,000 staff. We proposed conducting an interview with their new CEO Jane McNally to ensure that staff could see she was motivated, keen to drive the business forward with a clear vision, but also personable and human! Again working with Mustard Design, we produced a 2-page document that is now being sent out to all staff. In truth, my preference for a communication like this, given how personable Jane actually is, would have been to record a podcast so that staff could also hear her tone of voice and hear her enthusiasm directly. However, access to technology can't be guaranteed with this company and we didn't want to alienate staff who didn't have PC access.
Finally (not all our work but our next big project) we were asked by the Open University to work with them to produce a video for staff. The video is to help staff who are not based at the headquarters in Milton Keynes to understand what happens on that campus, and also for new starters who will be working at the Walton Hall (HQ) campus to understand what is available there to them. Working with @Warblefly Productions, we filmed this project this week and are now in the post-production phase.
Thursday 7 August 2008
Celebrating a year of creative communications
Yesterday evening we celebrated Pickle Jar Communications' 1st Birthday at The Earlsdon Cottage. We always receive excellent customer service from The Cottage but this time they excelled themselves and went that extra mile by fulfilling our quirky request to serve our guests jars of pickles, and labelling those jars up with the PJC logo without us even asking them to. Very sweet of them. A big thank you must also go to Creative Balloons of Earl Street, Coventry, who provided and delivered our corporate-coloured helium balloons with less than 24 hours notice.
Lots of bubbly was flowing as we celebrated a year of success with friends, colleagues and family. A big thank you to everyone that attended and all the messages of congratulations and best wishes that we received from those who weren't able to join us this time. Here's to another successful year ahead!
Photographs from the evening can be viewed on our facebook page.
Lots of bubbly was flowing as we celebrated a year of success with friends, colleagues and family. A big thank you to everyone that attended and all the messages of congratulations and best wishes that we received from those who weren't able to join us this time. Here's to another successful year ahead!
Photographs from the evening can be viewed on our facebook page.
Tuesday 5 August 2008
Party Pickle Video
Just been playing with animoto to see if I can create a short video for the Pickle Jar Communications first birthday party tomorrow. The challenge is to see how the high res dvd version works (if at all) on a large plasma screen. I expect it will struggle, but good for online versions.
Monday 4 August 2008
Bringing the genius of Wilkes University to a UK audience
I attended a Higher Education External Relations Association (HEERA) meeting week before last as a representative of the CIPR's Education and Skills group. They were chatting about different events that they might put on. Having recently become aware of Wilkes University's highly targetted advertising campaign that ran in Spring 2007, I mentioned this to them as an interesting case study for a conference session. It seems that none of the marketeers at the table had heard about this campaign, so I thought it worth putting a blog post up here with the link through to this New York Times article about the campaign. Personally, I think this is very daring and a genius approach: a clever marketing campaign that is so clever that the PR value it generated as a consequence is probably worth more to them than the actual marketing!
Funny cartoon - death of the tag cloud
Goodness me, it has been over two weeks since my last post! My have I been a busy bunny of late. More on that soon, but I thought I'd just doing a very quick post this morning while I am suffering insomnia induced by a tickly cough that seems to be building in my throat. Just been browsing back through ReadWriteWeb's blog posts and saw this fab cartoon on the death of tag clouds. Very funny.
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